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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27476989">Our Little Lives Don't Count</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account'>orphan_account</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Les Misérables - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Enjorlas survives AU, F/M, Happily Ever Afters are Hard, I promise, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, Then becomes coherent, Writing begins abstract, Éponine survives AU</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 19:41:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,583</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27476989</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"Our little lives don't count at all" </p><p>He’d oft said it. “Little lives”. But that was when their little lives were lined up for bigger deaths, for gunshots at barricades, for liberté. </p><p>Not for little afterwards, for little epilogues in little wagons on their way to the bloody meadows of France. </p><p>***<br/>Enjorlas and Eponine escape the slaughter of June, only to find themselves in the South of France, alone and desperate for meaning. A slow burn of two hurt souls trying to find peace.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Enjolras/Éponine Thénardier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Our Little Lives Don't Count</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Our Little Lives Don’t Count at All”</p><p> </p><p>He’d oft said it. “Little lives”. But that was when their little lives were lined up for bigger deaths, for gunshots at barricades, for <em>libert</em><em>é. </em></p><p>Not for little afterwards, for little epilogues in little wagons on their way to the bloody meadows of France.</p><p>As Enjorlas bites back a grunt of pain at every pothole, every cobblestone awry, he glances at the waif of a girl at his feet. Her coat – no, her <em>everything,</em> the colour of mud.  A glance at his own, a similar brown. The red one lies at the foot of the barricade.</p><p>Brown, instead, to hide. Like dried blood. Like the failure of being alive.</p><p>Brown, like Grantaire’s favourite cognac, blast that bastard and his cowardly schemes and his courage.</p><p>Blast him, Enjorlas thinks with every jolt of pain on his left as the wagon plods on. To the south. To a simple home in a simple village: a coward’s escape, a dying wish.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p>“Take this, and run.”</p><p>Grantaire’s voice is merely a whisper in the face of a dozen guns.</p><p>Wrinkled papers passed into Enjorlas’ right hand, a red flag in his left.</p><p>He goes to raise it, to let his little life become a bigger death.</p><p>But Grantaire – the coward that never wanted to die at a barricade, the rich boy who wanted to drink with his pretty friends and never to die for a <em>Patria </em>who’d never love him back – Grantaire. Grantaire.</p><p>“Take this, and run.”</p><p>Merely a whisper, making the strength of his shove unexpected. As Enjorlas falls, the flag catches on a parapet, slowing his descent, wrenching his left. And in a moment, as Grantaire dies above him, Enjorlas does what he could never do before: he runs.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p>The girl hasn’t awoken. She might be dead after all. Dead as she was in Marius’ arms, shining from the drizzle and leaking red. A little death. Bigger than her life, perhaps. Who knows. A waif, a gamine. </p><p>He tries to lift her onto the short bench of the back of the wagon, keep her off the muddy floor.</p><p>His broken left arm reminds him that he’s rather useless to her now.</p><p>But by all that is good, he will not suffer living if he cannot at least raise one little life from the gutter.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p>Courfreyac. Combeferre. Joly. Bossuet. Feuilly. Bahorel. Pontmercy. Grantaire.</p><p>Grantaire, that bastard. Grantaire, arranging with a sympathetic family acquaintance a simple wagon ride. A quiet exit from the chaos and bloodshed and gunpowder of Paris, of his pretty friends and their revolutionary ideas.</p><p>An escape he never took. Never can, dead by munition in Enjorlas’ place.</p><p>A home, bought and paid for. Cottage, most likely. A job as a country lawyer, a simple thing, and a simple wagon ride to get him there. Papers and deeds and letters in a wrinkled bundle, still in Enjorlas’ right hand.</p><p>His left hand feels emptier than all that coward’s bottles of courage.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p>She stirs on the third day in the wagon. Famished as he is – though Grantaire thought to pay the man, Pierre, for supplies aforehand, they are meager for two – his hunger disappears in the face of her wide, sunken eyes.</p><p>Her hand slips to her waist, to a wound stitched quickly by his dead friends – Joly, Combeferre, dead now, everyone dead – on a broken tavern table when they found her breathing amongst the corpses. A gasp escapes her.</p><p>She looks at him, confused.</p><p>He runs his hands through his hair – right. His short-cropped hair, darker from mud, nothing like the curls that would give him away despite his papers. A pauper’s coat. A farmer’s hair. An impoverished little waif at his feet that turns and immediately wretches into the mud.</p><p>Two more days’ ride to the south, to Brive-la-Gaillarde, and Enjorlas anticipates silence.</p><p>***</p><p>He throws away the flag first. Abandons his jacket second, stealing another off a corpse he doesn’t know. A pauper, with tattered edges and the smell of drink and piss.<br/>
<br/>
Then he runs. He hears Grantaire’s whisper and he runs from the barricade with tears blinding his eyes. The Chief, made coward by a man’s dying wish.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p>Silence doesn’t last a full minute.</p><p>“Where am I? Where’s Marius?”</p><p>Enjorlas chokes on the word ‘dead’.</p><p>And almost wrenches his right arm from its socket as he catches her, trying to jump off the wagon in her disoriented state, trying to claw her way back to the mud and blood of Paris.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p>He finds her right where they’d laid her, breathing shallowly as he snips haphazard at his curls.</p><p>It’s an errant thought – <em>save her – </em>and it comes to him in Grantaire’s whisper, an echo of a friend bleeding out a building over as soldiers march away.</p><p>His hair falls to the dusty floor. In the pocket of his brown coat, there’s a sliver of another life offered to him. He’d just read it, baffled. A home, a job. A sunny offer – and at the thought of all that brightness, all that newness, Enjorlas knows he must steal some reminder of this darkened room with him.</p><p>He carries her all the way to Pierre, adrenaline surging through his bloodied bent shoulder.</p><p>***</p><p>It is another day before she forgives him for shoving her back onto the rickety wagon. She refuses his food, his wine, his words. She, for lack of a better word, <em>sulks</em> as she convalesces. Too hurt to truly fight, but her spirit’s far from broken.</p><p>Enjorlas reconsiders bringing her along, but there’s something in the wary set of her eyes, the darkness of her hair, the desperation of her hands coiled, uncoiling, in Marius’ shirt – she is Grantaire cast in bony female form, ready to die for a love of someone else’s little life.</p><p>So he keeps trying.</p><p>Eventually, she takes a morsel of bread and seems to stop scheming how to wrench herself from the wagon.</p><p>“We’re going to Brive-la-Gaillarde,” Enjorlas offers as she chews.</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“Because I owe it to someone to die there.”</p><p>Oddly, she seems to accept this. And some more stale bread.</p><p>***</p><p>“She your mistress?” Pierre asks, confused. “That wasn’t in the agreement.”</p><p>“Something like that,” Enjorlas mumbles, in place of calling her what she is: his last tie to a life that’s died at the barricade like everyone else.</p><p>***</p><p>The companionable silence that follows his proclamation also doesn’t last.</p><p>“So, what’s in Brive-la-Gaillarde?”</p><p>“A town, I suppose. A house,” Enjorlas pulls the deed from his pocket.</p><p>He doesn’t expect the street urchin to tug it from his fingers and give it a glance.</p><p>“Whoever does your papers is better than mine.”</p><p>Enjorlas means to assert that the papers are legitimate, but it comes out as “you can read?”</p><p>She gives him a furtive look. “What’s it to you?”</p><p>He gapes for a moment, then clears his throat. “It will serve you well in a little village then. Perhaps you can teach at the local school.”</p><p>It is the first time he’s heard her laugh, a raspy, guttural sound. He doesn’t smile, but he almost wants to.</p><p>***</p><p>She questions him, his every decision, as though this escape was <em>his</em> scheme, not Grantaire’s.</p><p>“Where will you work?”<br/>
“Who are your references?”<br/>
“Is the house furnished?”<br/>
“Where will we stop next?”<br/>
“Will the house have a bath?”<br/>
“Am I your mistress, then?”</p><p>The last one catches him off guard.</p><p>“Why does everyone keep assuming that?” He’s righteously indignant, as though a mistress would sully his love for his cause. He has no more cause. He has no more loyalty – and yet. Yet, it feels <em>wrong</em>. He can hear Combferre’s quiet jabs. Feuilly’s smothered snickers.</p><p>“Well, what else am I s’posed to be?” Eponine – he learned, or perhaps remembered, her name several questions prior – and her expression is so <em>obvious</em> that the righteous indignation boils over.</p><p>“Not young enough to be your daughter,” she continues as Enjorlas fumes, “not polished enough to be your wife. And hey, some men like slumming it in the sewers in Paris. Even the countryfolk will know that.”</p><p>“You will <em>not </em>be my mistress.”</p><p>“Then what am I? You’ve got no head for this,” she chastises.</p><p>“Wife, then. We’ll find you a bath.”</p><p>She laughs again, that beautiful raspy noise that indicates she thinks he’s moronic. He’s been hearing more of it, can tell its nuances apart. She’s a cynic, like Grantaire, a loudmouth like Bossuet.</p><p>***</p><p>She’s ultimately a strategist, too. A survivalist, she understands the game of the con better than he can with his noble thoughts of revolution. He wants to spit that word from his mouth, but knows he will cherish its bitter taste until his last breath.</p><p>His failed revolution.</p><p>His dead friends.</p><p>Hearing her plot how to fool the commonfolk of Brive-la-Gaillarde into thinking them a couple that wants to escape the violence of Paris – “I tell you, mistress would be an easier sell” – is a hilarious endeavour. Almost distracting.</p><p>She tries so hard not to let hope into her eyes – Enjorlas knows the look well, from his less courageous soldiers. She speaks of a few simple dresses, a pair of scissors to fix his hair – no, keep the short beard. A few personal-seeming belongings to carry with them, sentimental things.</p><p>A quick stop at the neighbouring village – Grantaire thought of leaving funds with Pierre, blast and bless him – and the charade begins.</p><p>Their new life begins.</p><p>Her first dress is red. Enjorlas thinks of a world about to dawn.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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